Item Squish; is it really coming?

[Lockrocker75]

If you reduce the stat pool of every entity in the game, including players, by 90%, nothing would change beyond a cleaner looking combat log.

Numbers feel a little silly right now. I was disappointed that they didn't do the squish for MoP.

I agree. The numbers we see now is a bit ridiculous. Even Cata numbers were a bit silly. I think that LK had the perfect numbers to go for in a game. Bigger isn't always better. But it is what it is. I doubt we will see any number crunch any time soon.

[LocNess]

Also to add to that "90% reduction". I can't wait to spend the first 20 levels hitting for 1s through 10s.

5 combo evisceration? 20 CRIT!? OMGRAGGLEFRAGGLEBANATANGULUS. I know 1-60 will not change, but people at least throw some thought out there before you start throwing random numbers into the mix.

[Scorned]

Now come MoP, DPS in Full HC gear is about 120k at most, tanks having 500-550k health

At the end of MoP, we probably will have 650-750k health on tanks and DPS doing 180-200k.

Your current numbers are a bit low, depending on class. I currently have about 760k health on my DK fully buffed, and that's without full BiS gear and while prioritizing mastery over stam when using gems and enchants. A monk tank guildmate of mine had very similar health when he stacked stam/mastery for heroic Sha. It may also be worth noting that the shaman healing player buff increases total tank HP by 10% in most raid combat situations.

This may throw off your predicted values.

[Tehterokkar]

Your current numbers are a bit low, depending on class. I currently have about 760k health on my DK fully buffed, and that's without full BiS gear and while prioritizing mastery over stam when using gems and enchants. A monk tank guildmate of mine had very similar health when he stacked stam/mastery for heroic Sha. It may also be worth noting that the shaman healing player buff increases total tank HP by 10% in most raid combat situations.

This may throw off your predicted values.

I just remember some random numbers, thanks for pointing it out. That changes everything then, if tanks already have 760k at first tier, It will be 900k or higher for Stamina stacking(Stamina hybrid in every slot and stamina trinkets) tanks at the end of the expansion.

[bufferunderrun]

Why peoples care soo much? isn't it more realistic that the more you advance in the game the biggest the hp pools and numbers get? I still prefer fighting a 10trillion hp Sargeras that give me the idea he was a fallen god than a 1million hp sargeras that feel like mob101 in ton long.

[Elegiac]

Why peoples care soo much? isn't it more realistic that the more you advance in the game the biggest the hp pools and numbers get? I still prefer fighting a 10trillion hp Sargeras that give me the idea he was a fallen god than a 1million hp sargeras that feel like mob101 in ton long.

Because it causes lag for addons, the numbers are a hassle to read, and most people only pay attention to the first few digits anyway.

[Deleted]

There won't be an item squish, they already abandoned that idea.

---------- Post added 2013-02-27 at 03:40 PM ----------

We'll see last tier of the expansion... in ICC, Druid tanks were at like 70k health, so that's like 52k outside of ICC. DPS was around 16-17k before ICC buff. Come Cata, DPS went to about 30k in T11 heroic gear and tank health around 140k at most IIRC.

Now at the end of Cata, Tanks had almost 200k health I believe. DPS were reaching 50k on Ultraxion "easily", about 55k was top DPS. Now come MoP, DPS in Full HC gear is about 120k at most, tanks having 500-550k health

At the end of MoP, we probably will have 650-750k health on tanks and DPS doing 180-200k.

At the beginning of next expansion, if they go with previous increases, we'll likely see about 1.75m health on tanks(about 2.5 times increase per expansion in health), seems highly unlikely, expect 1m though. DPS would be 300-350k probably.

And they said there would be another expansion after this... Hurray for 1m DPS and 4m health on tanks!

Your numbers are pretty low. At full bis at the end of the expansion tanks will sit well above 800k HP.

[Wildtree]

I fail to see a relation between Sunwell fix and item squish.. It's a fix to the mechanics, that made soloing the fight nearly impossible. It has nothing to do with the numbers...
And no, I don't see an item squish coming either.. If anything, they simply change it to meta numbers. 300.000 dmg to 300k.. Same output, smaller to the eye..

[Thyranne]

Because it causes lag for addons, the numbers are a hassle to read, and most people only pay attention to the first few digits anyway.

I thought we had proved that it was false a few pages ago.

[Barael]

Big numbers isn't the issue; scaling is. Players roughly triple in power each expansion so after 4 expansions, a MoP character is in the order of 3^4 (=81) times more powerful in simple numbers than a level 60. If instead we only got twice as powerful each expansion, we'd only be around 2^4 (=16) times more powerful than a level 60 player. I personally think 16 would be quite enough whereas 81 is somewhere between ridiculous and absurd. This wouldn't even kill soloing old raids, just move them down a notch. Cataclysm for example would probably be impossible to solo during MoP, but WoTLK would be about as hard or slightly easier than Cata etc.

Btw with current scaling, next expansion we'll be around 250 times more powerful numbers-wise than at level 60. Compare to 32 times if the scaling factor was 2 instead.

[Celarent]

Recently it occurred to me that the "mega-damage" solution half-jokingly proposed in Ghostcrawler's old Watercooler post could actually come about more naturally by the next expansion.

We're already mentally abbreviating numbers: 300K may as well be 300. Before long most stat increases on gear will jump on a scale of thousands, at which point digits beyond the first one or two are no more meaningful than if they were behind a decimal point.

As far as old content is concerned, compression shouldn't matter much. The early stuff should fall over in about the same time, while immediately prior content will still be separated by a wide gear-gap (otherwise the new max level would be meaningless).

[Unholyground]

Their plan was never a 90% (or any %) reduction, but a sliding scale of nerfs. The level 1-60 experience would not change, but instead of BC content ending at 150 or so item levels, it would end at 120-ish. And WOLK content would start at 120 and end at about 200, the cataclysm start at 200. So it was just a massive nerf, basically. That being said, I believe it will be here next expansion.

I am pretty sure they were thinking closer to what TBC is now only having about a 20 item level gap between expansions.

[Gurbz]

Although the thought of a more linear ilvl curve while keeping our relative power would be quite funny indeed, then we'd have lowbies doing Molten Core

We basically have that now. I remember when they first put in the ability to shut off experience gains. There was a group of us that decided it would be cool to do the old Vanilla raids at level 60. So we all rolled new characters, stopped at 60, and put in the rule that you could not have any item/talent/etc that did not come from vanilla.

Our first scheduled raid night we had some severe attendance problems and only had 8 people online. Figuring there was no way we would even get past the trash in MC, we decided we would take our group of 8 into ZG. We assumed we would kill some trash, wipe a lot, have some laughs, then go home.

We cleared the entire raid. Without wiping once. With less than half the supposedly required number of players, at level, in primarily quest greens and the occasional blue. It was actually so disheartening, given what we were trying to do (recreate the vanilla raid environment) that the group fell apart.

And if anything, in the 1.5 expansions since that time level 60s have gotten stronger. Do I think a level 60 could solo MC? No probably not. But I would not put it past a level 70 in TBC gear.

I totally understand the issue of players still wanting to be able to solo old raids for mounts, transmog, etc. But there are plenty of solutions to make that happen. If nothing else, the raid testing on the PTR has already demonstrated that Blizzard does have the ability to scale our gear UP in power as well as down, so it would be feasible to simply scale the gear of whomever zoned into an old raid to a level that Blizzard determines is enough to solo it.

[Thalur]

This is the basic algorithm (spelling?):

a, b, c, i : integer;
a = 0;
b = 0;
for i = 0 to 999999999 do
begin
a = a + 1;
b = b + 1;
c = a + b;
end

{in before: YOU CHANGED THE VALUE OF A VARIABLE WITHOUT USING := THIS IS NOT PASCAL!!!!}

514ms to do 999999999 * 4 operations is far from crazy. Maybe if I had used an asm block...

This is what an optimizer would change your code into:

a, b, c, i : integer;
a = 999999999
b = 999999999
c = a + b;

Good luck testing something like that.

[Deleted]

Big numbers isn't the issue

Direct quote from GC:
"Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can’t quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we’d have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters."

So yes, big numbers IS an issue.

[MasterHamster]

Direct quote from GC:
"Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can’t quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we’d have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters."

So yes, big numbers IS an issue.

I think everyone who is the least interested in the debate has read that quote, and there's no way he meant that computing time, within the limits of a float or integer, is an issue. Why? Because adding 000,000,001+000,000,001 and say 223,512,651 + 237,281,989 takes the same amount of time as long as no cross-limit calculations is done.

However, if they could force numbers down and use smaller integers, that could lend some credibility to the idea that lesser numbers = less computational stress

[Crashdummy]

This is what an optimizer would change your code into:

a, b, c, i : integer;
a = 999999999
b = 999999999
c = a + b;

Good luck testing something like that.

Pascal doesnt do that kind of optimization as far as i know.

Maybe a test that is not as easy to optimize would be:

a := 0
b := 0
c :=0
for i: 0 to 999999999 do
begin
a := c + 1
b := b + i
c := a + b
end

[Thyranne]

This is what an optimizer would change your code into:

a, b, c, i : integer;
a = 999999999
b = 999999999
c = a + b;

Good luck testing something like that.

There is no such thing like that for Pascal (at least I've never heard of it).

[Rogabr]

If you reduce the stat pool of every entity in the game, including players, by 90%, nothing would change beyond a cleaner looking combat log.

Numbers feel a little silly right now. I was disappointed that they didn't do the squish for MoP.

thats absurd; the starting content you would see mobs with shit like "3.2hp"

[Deleted]

Item squish becomes more and more necessary. There is only so much the number can climb before it turns from acceptable over to laughable. I can't remember what it was called right now, but we actually have a nice little Game Design term for that.